


Sensibilia

by the_moonmoth



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sense8 (TV) Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-16 17:48:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5834986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_moonmoth/pseuds/the_moonmoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new cluster has been awoken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sensibilia

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on tumblr, "Xander and an obscure AU. Maybe one where he is tolerable?" I almost gave up on this prompt, because making early-seasons Xander tolerable (to me) is a pretty big ask, but I got an idea yesterday so let’s see how this goes. I bring you: a Sense8/BtVS AU! Beta'd by the wonderful bewildered -- thank you! And before anyone asks, yes, I am mulling on expanding this universe!
> 
> Warning for some misogynistic language and shitty parenting.

 

_19th January 1981_

 

Alexander Lavelle Harris was born in Sunnydale Memorial Hospital amid the usual amount of fuss and mess. His mother looked on as he was weighed and measured, exhausted but largely indifferent, while his father was drinking himself half-dead a few blocks away – celebratory, he kept growling at the barman, though in fact he’d been planning to leave his bitch of a wife before she went and got herself up the spout, a fact he would make no bones about repeating to his son over the years to come.

 

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Buffy Anne Summers was being cradled and cooed over by parents who thought she couldn’t possibly be any more precious or perfect, and in Bern, Willow Danielle Rosenberg slept peacefully at her mother’s hospital bedside, while her father watched over them both and dreamed what kind of brilliant future his girl would achieve.

 

Thousands more children were born that day. Only four of them are of interest.

 

And in China, a man who had traveled there running from his fate met his end in a darkened alley. 

 

*

 

_19th January 1986_

 

On his fifth birthday Xander got a best friend. The new girl in kindergarten had come from Switzerland, the teacher said, and he didn’t know which state that was in but she sure did talk funny. Oh, and she was  _smart,_ like reading whole books by herself smart. Xander wasn’t smart and his accent was boring and normal, but he knew what it was like to be picked on for being different, and let her share the crayons with him at the coloring table _._

 

After the first week, Willow told him they were going out now, which seemed to mean doing everything together same as always, only sometimes doing it holding hands. It lasted until a few days later, when his mommy had to come and pick him up early from the play date at Willow’s nice, clean-smelling house because he’d tried to steal her Barbie and they’d got into a fight. He was sent to bed without any dinner for his trouble, and cried himself to sleep.

 

It wasn’t until Monday that he got to explain himself. The doll had reminded him of the other little girl, the one in his head who he sometimes visited, even though he never knew how he got there. He’d wanted it so as not to feel so lonely when it was just him at home with his parents, who often shouted at each other and at him.

 

Willow didn’t budge on the doll, but he would realize later that what she did give him was better. She told him sometimes she visited the little blonde girl too, just as she had visited him before she came to Sunnydale, though he’d always been asleep. The girl’s name was Buffy, Willow said, and she was a superhero.

 

*

 

_19th January 1987_

 

For his sixth birthday party, Xander’s parents hired a clown. He didn’t liked him from the moment he arrived, with the big shoes and fake hair and the overly-chipper face paint on top of a grim expression. He tried to tell his mommy to send it away, but instead she got annoyed with him and made him sit right in the front when the magic show started. He flinched every time the clown came too near, and that made the other kids laugh. The clown laughed too, and made a point of doing it more, and when Xander finally got up because he couldn’t take it anymore, the clown chased him all around the house.

 

He was hiding in the bathroom when Buffy appeared. She asked him why he was crying, and didn’t laugh, but put her hands on her hips, jaw set, and then he  _was_  Buffy, yelling “Power Girl to the rescue!” and careening out of the bathroom to kick the clown in the shins.

 

He got such a spanking for that. Totally worth it.

 

*

 

_1987 – 1996_

 

Every now and then, Xander would have strange dreams. Not the usual, being-chased-by-a-rabid clown kind, but the oh-god-whose-head-am-I- _in?_  kind. He would dream of running through cornfields with his heart in his throat and danger at his back; touching a curling photo of a smiling family and trying to make himself remember them; an enormous library that was filled with books and the fear of failure; and lots and lots of rabbits.

 

The nightmares, when they came, were terrible. A dark-haired woman screaming for him, but he couldn’t get to her; another woman in the midst of a fire, sword flashing as she went down to an overwhelming attack; the laughter of a tall man, not joyful, as it had once been, but twisted and menacing; yellow eyes in the dark and pain in his neck.

 

He would talk about it with Willow sometimes. Not the details, because it turned out she knew them, too, but just to share the weirdness and horror of it. They always felt so real.

 

Eventually they realized this wasn’t normal.

 

*

 

_19th January 1996_

 

Early on the morning of his fifteenth birthday, Xander awoke from the screaming-woman dream to find her standing at the end of his bed. She wore a long, white, old-fashioned nightgown, dark brown hair hanging loose over her shoulders, and her skin was so pale she almost seemed to glow.

 

“Are... are you an angel?” he asked stupidly.

 

The question seemed to amuse her and she gave a small  _hmm_  of a laugh, eyes glittering darkly. “Not half,” she said, voice softly accented – not like Willow’s had been when she’d first moved here, more like... Dick Van Dyke? In his chimneysweep days? Was that even a thing? Before he could puzzle it out, she held out her hands to him and said, “Time to wake up, now.”

 

Xander awoke to find his bed surrounded by people, watching him or looking around his room with varying expressions of bemusement. Seven, he counted – Willow, Buffy, three other girls, a prim-looking guy with glasses and a shadowy figure at the back who was barely an outline but definitely there.

 

“What in the name of Jesus Christ Superstar is going on here?” he asked.

 

Xander awoke to find his bedroom empty and the sun shining through a crack in the curtains. When he called Willow, the same thing had happened to her. Of course.

 

*

 

_1996_

 

After that morning, Xander suddenly had more than Buffy and Willow in his life and, occasionally, in his head. Some of them he saw more than others – none of them were really sure how that worked – but when he visited, aside from Buffy, it was mostly Wes and Tara who he saw. 

 

Wes was scary-smart, like Willow, and also kinda scary-rich. He lived like some historical throw-back guy in a mansion somewhere in India, and mostly Xander liked him because Wes, with his books and his fussy ways, made Xander look cool.

 

Tara was... well, shy didn’t even begin to cover it, and the kids she went to school with made him look on Cordelia with fond forbearance. The day he got to go into her head to give the patented Xander Harris Witty Comeback to a snotty group of girls who’d cornered her was a very proud day indeed. They bonded over their worthless fathers and thinking Willow was excellent, and he was the first person in their weird little group she told about being gay. She got real quiet after his enthusiastic endorsement of the hot lady lovin’, though, and it took Willow to unpick why she no longer wanted to talk to him. He could’ve hit himself, and in fact invited Tara to do so. That – finally – made her smile, but all she said was, “Maybe next time.”

 

The shadowy guy only ever visited Xander once that year, slipping into his head in the locker room one afternoon just as Larry Blaisdell was starting in on him. Xander had no idea who the guy was, or even  _where_  he was, and his knuckles throbbed for days afterwards, but man, that punch had been sweet.

 

*

 

_19th January 1997_

 

Xander saw his first Watcher on his sixteenth birthday. He was sitting with Buffy on the sunny steps outside her high school as she waited for her boyfriend, thinking how weird it was that he could taste the strawberry lolly she was sucking on, when he spotted the old guy in tweed approaching. 

 

“Hey, Buff,” he said, nudging her. “Humbert Humbert at twelve o’clock.”

 

She was a cheerleader now, and popular, so she didn’t especially like talking to him when she was in public because she’d look like a total nut-job talking to thin air. Himself, Xander had given up on any pretense of cool years ago, and yeah, it had been hard at first to be ignored by his best friend, but he couldn’t really fault her for it. It was bad enough with Cordelia sniping at him in Sunnydale – he really didn’t feel the need to experience it from Buffy’s end, too.

 

“Oh, great,” Buffy murmured back, mouth barely moving. “This: boding not well.”

 

Xander didn’t see his first vampire on his sixteenth birthday, but only because he realized he’d been dreaming about them for years.

 

*

 

_1997_

 

Buffy moved to Sunnydale later that year and Xander didn’t know what to do with so much good fortune. It was nice to visit, no doubt about it, but actually having her there, as in,  _right there_? Things like that just didn’t happen to Alexander Lavelle Harris. Case in point: the only friends he’d ever had besides Willow and Jesse were scattered across the globe and not exactly reachable on demand. In fact, sometimes visiting with them was distinctly inconvenient. Whatever. Buffy had moved and was starting at Sunnydale High  _that day_  and he was so excited he crashed his skateboard when he caught sight of her in the flesh for the first time.

 

When she saw him, she gave him a brilliant, face-splitting smile and pulled him up with enough force that he went several inches into the air before landing on his feet.

 

“Xander!” she said delightedly, hugging him. “Look at you! With the see-age! And the physical body!  Can you show me to the office? I have to go sign my soul over to the authorities before class.”

 

“Sure thing, Buffster,” he said, leading the way with his own goofy grin. “I got you into homeroom with Willow and me. Just a bit of garden-variety Xan-man charm, all in a day’s work, no need to thank me.”

 

“Oh my god, Willow!” Buffy said, practically bouncing. “I can’t wait.”

 

“That the new girl?” Jesse asked, coming up beside him a couple minutes later as Xander loitered outside the office. He looked her up and down, eyes coming to rest around butt-level. “Nice.”

 

Xander rolled his eyes, ears still clanging from the lecture the stuffy Jamaican girl had given him recently (now that she could actually look him in the eye), and the guys who catcalled Tara on a regular basis, and the asshole Buffy had had to deal with coming home from patrol last week.

 

“You know,” Xander said, patting his friend on the shoulder. “I have it on excellent authority that there’s nothing women love more than having their  _ass_ ets ogled. Keep it up, buddy, your single days are numbered for sure.”

 

“What flew up your ass and died?” Jesse said easily, barely sparing him a glance.

 

“I think they call it manners?” Xander suggested.

 

_‘Were you raised in a barn? Women are people, not cattle!’ Kendra fumed._

 

_‘They’re not saying anything you didn’t say,’ Tara pointed out quietly._

_‘Geez, pushy much?’ Buffy said as she shoved the guy and his so-very-much unwanted attention away._

“Yep, definitely manners.”

 

“Hey,” Buffy said, appearing between them. “All done.”

 

“Hey,” Jesse said, propping himself not-very-artfully against the doorframe and doing his narrow-eyed attempt at the sexy nod. “I’m Jesse.”

 

“Oh, uh, hi,” Buffy said with a sort of blank politeness. She turned back to Xander. “So, homeroom?”

 

As they walked down the corridor side-by-side, Xander couldn’t help the smug expression he shot Jesse over his shoulder. Didn’t matter that Buffy was like a sister to him – that brush-off had been a thing of song and marvel. _Manners_ , Xander mouthed pointedly.

 

“Friend of yours?” Buffy asked dryly once they were out of earshot.

 

“What, Jesse? Uh, yeah. Sadly.”

 

“He’s… eager.”

 

“He’s young,” Xander said sagely. “But he will learn. Hey, so get this – Wes visited me last night and while he was there he did my math homework.”

 

“What? No fair!”

 

“I know! Totally untapped resource. Apparently he likes the – ah, how did he put it? – the concrete nature of the—”

 

“Miss Summers?”

 

Buffy sighed. “Now what?”

 

They both turned to find a guy in tweed standing just this side of the double library doors.

 

“Let me guess…” Buffy said, smiling wryly at Xander.

 

“New Watcher?”

 

“New Watcher.”

 

“Rupert Giles,” Tweed Guy admitted a moment later, after a certain amount of Wesley-like bluster. “Your new Watcher.”


End file.
